Rong Fu

Professor
Department: Atmospheric and Oceanic Sciences
rfu@atmos.ucla.edu
Website
Keywords: Science, Amazonia

Rong Fu is a climate researcher and a professor in the Department of Atmospheric and Oceanic Sciences, and the Director of the Joint Institute for Earth System Science and Engineering at University of California, Los Angeles. Her research focuses on the mechanisms that control droughts, rainfall seasonality and variability over Amazonian and North American regions, and how changes of global climate, local vegetation and biomass burning, and oceanic decadal variability have influenced these processes in the recent past and will influence rainfall seasonality and droughts in the future. She has also developed a drought early warning for US Great Plains working with regional water resource managers. Her research is among the earliest to observationally uncover significant roles of tropical rainforests in determining rainfall seasonality over Amazonia and Tibetan Plateau in determining water vapor transport to global stratosphere.

She received NSF CAREER and NASA New Investigator Awards, and the American Meteorological Society (AMS) Outstanding Achievement Award for biometeorology. She is also an elected fellow of the AMS, the American Geophysical Union (AGU) and the American Association For the Advancement of Science (AAAS), respectively. She is an elected council member of the AMS, was the former President of the Global Environmental Change Section (2015-2016) and a member of the Leadership Team of the AGU and the Chair of the AAAS Atmosphere and Hydrosphere (2022). She has served on many national and international panels, such as the National Research Council special committees on “Abrupt Impact of Climate Change” and “Landscapes on the Edge,” the Climate Working Group for NOAA Science Advisory Board. She is a co-leader of the NOAA Drought Task Force Phase IV and an Editor of Journal of Geophysical Research – Atmosphere, the editor of the Climate and Climate Change Section, the 3rd Edition of the Encyclopedia of Atmospheric Sciences, and the editor of the Water Cycle and Land-Atmospheric Interaction Section of the 2nd Edition of the Encyclopedia of Climate System Science.